Are There Really Jews in China?: An Update

Daniel J. Elazar

Since the opening of China to Western tourism, there has
been a renewed interest in the Chinese Jews; a bit of Jewish
exotica which resurfaces in the West from time to time. (Because
of its unusual nature, more has been written about the
historically insignificant Jewish community of Kaifeng than about
the Jewish communities of Chicago or Moscow.) In 1985, Time
Magazine even had a full page article on the Chinese Jews of
Kaifeng which effectively anointed them full-fledged Jews seeking
to preserve their Jewish heritage.

In May 1985, I was in China by invitation to lecture at the
Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, the official government
policy research institute, on "The Organizational Dynamics of
American Jewry". One of my hosts was Professor Gao Wangezhi,
whose own principal interest is Jewish studies, especially the
study of the Jews in China. I also met with Professor Zhao, one
of the vice-presidents of the Academy, himself a scholar of the
philosophy of religion and interested in Jewish thought. I
talked with Sidney Shapiro, a Brooklyn Jew who settled in China
in 1947 to participate in the Chinese revolution and has since
become a Chinese citizen and has raised a Chinese family. Since
resurfacing in the West a decade ago, he has become a link
between China and world Jewry, makes bagels and lox at home; has
visited the United States several times since former President
Richard Nixon opened Chinese-American relations in 1971; and
pursues the study of the Jews of China as an avocation. Lastly I
visited with various Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, stationed
in China at the American Embassy.

Needless to say, one of the major questions which I raised
was, to what extent are there Jews in China? And, if there are
any, who are they? What follows is I believe, the best available
answer to these questions; one which accurately reflects the
current situation.

The State of the Kaifeng Community

There are four groups of Jews, or people of Jewish descent in
China. The first are the so-called Chinese Jews of Kaifeng, now
estimated at some 100 families totalling approximately 500
people. The city of Kaifeng, located approximately 300 miles
from Beijing, contains the remnants of a Jewish community which
flourished in the city from about the ninth to the seventeenth
centuries, and which continued to be identifiably Jewish until
the 1840s. The origins of the community are unclear, although
they appear to be derived from an invitation extended by a Sung
Dynasty emperor to a group of Jews to settle and manufacture
cotton fabrics in Kaifeng, which at that time was the imperial
capital. Approximately 1000 Jews responded as a group and formed
a community, which reached its peak in the Middle Ages, when Jews
from Western and Southern Asia (principally Iran, Afghanistan and
India of today) were actively involved in the China trade. They
settled in at least six other cities throughout China, including
Beijing in the seventeenth century.

Of those communities, only Kaifeng Jewry flourished
sufficiently to survive for a millennium, preserving some traces
of their Jewishness until their synagogue was destroyed by an
earthquake in the 1840s and the last of them assimilated. The
only remnants of the community today are a knowledge of the site
of the synagogue, upon which another building now stands; a stele
from the Middle Ages with inscriptions of major events in the
history of the community carved into it, but no longer legible;
and a practice, still preserved by some, of avoiding the eating
of pork. The surviving records and artifacts of the community
have long since been transferred to Britain or the United States.
I myself have seen one of the community's two surviving Torah
scrolls in the Hebrew Union College library in Cincinnati. There
are substantial records of the community's existence, compiled or
written by Europeans, since the Kaifeng Jews were discovered by
the Jesuits in the sixteenth century.

Beginning with the settlement of Jews in Shanghai, Canton
and Hong Kong in the nineteenth century, some efforts were made
to bring the Jews of Kaifeng back into the Jewish fold, but all
of these came to naught. In my opinion, based upon the
experiences of similar Jewish populations in other parts of the
world which had also acquired an indigenous cast over the
centuries and appeared racially different, these local Jews,
living in a xenophobic environment, were afraid to identify with
any foreigners. As a result, the Jews themselves hastened the
process of their assimilation into the general society. Still
the facts of their assimilation are murky. Some became "simply
Chinese," as Professor Gao described them, but most became "white
Moslems," who did not eat pork but did not practice traditional
Islam either. To avoid pork in China is to set oneself truly
apart and, in a civilzation where organized religion is virtually
unknown, this leaves many questions unanswered.

In any case, it would be hard to claim the Chinese of Jewish
descent in Kaifeng today as Jews. At the same time, as the
result of their new contacts with Western Jewry, there has been a
revival of local interest in their own heritage. Two of the
senior members of the community are now seeking to establish a
museum of Chinese Jewish history in Kaifeng. Since there are
virtually no Jewish artifacts or documents remaining in the city,
even if they are successful, they will have to rely upon
facsimiles of the originals now spread around the world.

They do have the enthusiastic backing of the Kaifeng
municipal government, whose leaders envision such a museum as a
major tourist attraction. The Chinese have caught on to the high
percentage of Jewish tourists in China and have noticed that the
American Jewish Congress is a major sponsor of China tours. It
is not unreasonable for the people of Kaifeng to expect that a
substantial portion of the Jewish tourists would come to Kaifeng
to see a Jewish museum. On the other hand, they still have not
received the necessary clearance from the central government
which is acting very cautiously, perhaps out of fear of offending
the Arabs; nor do they have any funds. They are attempting to
raise some money with the help of an American Jew temporarily
residing in China as an English teacher, but have apparently made
no real progress.

The museum is the only plan they have for reviving a formal
Jewish presence in Kaifeng. There are no plans to rebuild the
synagogue, since the site is otherwise occupied. At the same
time, they are seeking recognition for the Jews as China's
ninety-seventh recognized nationality, which would bring them
many benefits, not the least of which would be an exemption from
the severe restrictions on childbearing, which allow Han Chinese
(the group which comprises 93 percent of the chinese population)
couples only one child.

Despite all of these obstacles, this observer would hazard a
guess that some of these 500 Kaifeng Jews will indeed become
Jewish over the next several decades, because the Jews of the
West will make them into Jews. Once discovered, they will be
pursued in one way or another until they and their neighbors
become so conscious of their "Jewishness" that the deed will be
done even if it will not be halakhically recognized.

While in China, I heard from Professor Gao that Rabbi Joshua
Stampfer of Portland, Oregon, had brought one of the girls of
Kaifeng to Portland to study and return to Judaism; a report
subsequently confirmed in The New York Times in June 1985. In
September 1986, I saw her at the University of Judaism in Los
Angeles where she is presently studying. In the meantime, there
are at least some people in China who want to study the
historical records of Jews who settled in the country prior to
modern times. There is likely to be more of that as well.

Remnants of the Jewish Refugees

Just as the Jews of Kaifeng were disappearing as Jews, China
received a new wave of Jewish settlement - Sephardi merchants
from the countries bordering on the Arabian Sea who accompanied
the British to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tientsin and other cities
opened to foreigners in those years. Jewish communities of
several hundred people were formed in each of the first three
cities. They were joined by a larger migration of Jewish
refugees during the period from the turn of the century to World
War II.

Thousands of Jews fleeing Russia, the upheavals of World War
I and Nazism, found their way to China. They established
communities in such places as Harbin, Tientsin, Mukden and
Shanghai. For nearly half a century, Jewish life flourished in
those communities, reaching a peak population of over 30,000. A
kehillah (a formal Jewish community organization) was formed in
Shanghai and for a few years, there were even yeshivot in the
city, established by refugees from Nazism who left as soon as
World War II ended.

After the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949, there was a
mass exodus of these refugees, particularly to Israel, Australia,
and North America. The communities were dissolved, leaving
British-ruled Hong Kong as the only Chinese city with an
organized Jewish life. By the early 1960s, only two Jews
remained on the books in Shanghai out of a community of 20,000.
The Joint Distribution Committee knew of a diminishing handful of
others in other cities. It seemed that all the others
emigrated.

With the reopening of China in the 1970s, occasional Jews
from Shanghai were found, mainly women who had married Chinese or
Russian non-Jews and had stayed behind with their husbands. Most
of them are now widowed and living out their remaining years in
obscurity. There are probably no more than a dozen such people,
if that many. One example is Israel Epstein, who was one of the
leading English propagandists for Communist China until his
retirement. He was brought to China from Poland at the age of
two by his refugee parents and "grew up with the country."

Foreign Friends

A third group of Jews in China consists of the "foreign
friends," people like Sidney Shapiro who came from the West in
the 1940s, particularly from North America, to join the Communist
revolution. While these foreign friends were by no means all
Jewish a large percentage were. Those who stayed acquired
Chinese citizenship, married local women, and settled down to
endure the trials and tribulations of the post-revolutionary
generation. Today, a handful of them still remain.

Jews on Sojourn

The largest group of actual Jews in China are temporarily
stationed in the country either in foreign embassies as members
of the foreign diplomatic corps - particularly that of the United
States - or in connection with business interests and technical
assistance programs. There also are a few who come individually
for brief periods of time under contracts to teach English or to
provide some other such service. Again, we have no accurate
count, but there are likely to be at least 200 such Jews in China
at any given time. When I was there, they included such people
as the Second Secretary of the U.S. Embassy for Cultural Affairs
in Beijing, and the Consul for Cultural Affairs at the Consulate
General in Shenyang (formerly Mukden). There also are an
undetermined number of Israelis who are reported to be in China
providing technical assistance in agriculture. In several cases,
sojourners have married Chinese partners, some of whom have
converted to Judaism.

It is these Jews who provide whatever organized Jewish life
exists in China, notably an annual Passover Seder and some kind
of Kol Nidre service on Yom Kippur eve. In every case, there are
ad hoc affairs, organized by some member of the "Jewish
Community" at his or her initiative and reaching out to those
Jews who happen to be in the vicinity. Thus Ruth Ann Kurtzbauer,
Second Secretary of the U.S. Embassy, organized the Seder in
Beijing in 1985 in her apartment in which 50 people participated,
35 of them Jewish. Matzot were sent in from the United States,
and there were enough people present with sufficiently
traditional backgrounds to conduct an American-style Seder.

The Jewish Presence in East Asia and the Pacific

If none of this adds up to much, it is only another
reflection of how thoroughly Jews are absent from East Asia.
There are approximately two billion people in the area from the
Sino-Russian border to Singapore and eastward to Hawaii. In all
of that vast area, there are no more than five permanent Jewish
communities: Tokyo and Kobe in Japan; Manila in the Philippines;
Hong Kong; and Singapore, with a total of less than 2,000 Jews
among them. Moreover, only Hong Kong and Singapore have had any
significant Jewish presence in modern hisotry. That is because
both are new cities, established in the nineteenth century by the
British, and attracted Sephardi Jews from the Persian Gulf and
Arabian Sea regions. The only other Jewish concentrations in the
Asian-Pacific region are the 90,000 Jews of Australia and the
5,000 Jews in Hawaii. Jews from both communities are in the
process of forging contacts with the other countries of the
Pacific rim. If those contacts develop, no doubt in time there
will be permanent Jewish settlers in China who wish to retain
their Jewish identity and connections. But, for the moment, the
Jews of China remain something between an exotic memory and a
transient whisper.